Review: James D’Amato’s ‘The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide’ Will Have You Reaching For Dice!

One of the most enjoyable aspects of playing role-playing games (RPGs) is the ability to create an avatar of you to go on perilous adventures may they involve lifting curses, protecting villages from bandits, stealing relics from trolls, or befriending a dragon to fulfill a prophecy.

Sometimes people have trouble coming up with a believable character or find it difficult to really “know” their character which may make their character not enjoyable to fellow RPG adventurers. James D’Amato’s book “The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide” will help you bring your character(s) to life!

After reading this book I see it’s more than a “how to” book, it’s an interactive tome that makes creating your character fun and unique! If you’re new to the whole RPG world like me, don’t be afraid of this book! Each chapter is based off skill level, just like RPG games you start from level 1 and work your way up as you gain more experience!

First chapter “Humble Beginnings” player levels 1-7

The second chapter “Veteran Heroes” Player level 8-14

Third chapter “Myths and Legends” Player level 15-20

As I mentioned before, this book is interactive in itself! If you’re serious about getting into RPGs and are interested in this book, you’ll need some RPG dice, I had to do a crash course, dice used in RPG games may require specific numbers so some dice have different number of faces, you’ll see dice labeled “D6” “D9” “D12” so on and so forth, don’t worry, “D” means dice and the number is how many sides the dice has.

Your character creating journey itself seems like a game, there’s space available to write in the book (personally I would use a piece of paper) which I feel helps add to pencil and paper feel to the famed tabletop RPGs! What I like about this book is even if you don’t want to play with others, you could entertain yourself by creating characters for fun OR to help you create characters for a book or short story.

From what I’ve read so far, this book is pure fun. If someone like me who knows little to nothing about traditional RPG’s could enjoy this book, then other newcomers to the genre and returning heroes from past fellowships will find something in this for them.

It’s no surprise that a book like this is so helpful; James D’Amato is one of the Game Masters over at his podcast “One Shot Podcast” where he and fellow Game Masters, Kat Kuhl, Meghan Dornbrock, and Alex Roberts devote themselves to making RPGs fun and welcoming to newcomers and veterans alike!

If “The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide” sounds like something you want to add to your library, the book comes out October 2, 2018, and you can pre-order it HERE!

About Daniel S. Liuzzi

I’m a poet and aspiring writer from New York with a love for Video Games and anything Japanese. I Facepalm professionally in my spare time while I study to become a priest in the Church of Cthulhu. I occasionally have stories or poems up over at spillwords.Com